Meet Artist Lily Keenan

Lucy Shanahan

Intricate, imaginative and adventurous, Sydney-based artist Lily Keenan’s illustrations have you exploring folk tales that flourish in the witching hours. Hailing from Western Australia, Keenan is influenced by her ever-changing environments to find harmony in anatomy and botany, amalgamating images from old medical journals with plant life, conceptualising the x-ray of a whale and adding twists to hard science with mythical creatures. We chat to her about her inspirations, creative spaces and the best life advice she’s ever received.

What’s your body of work about?This style started in my final year of high school, when I was doing what every art student has to do, a body of work on the human body. I’ll never forget, I planned to do this slightly tacky sculpture, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but my art teacher, Mr. Wood, was like ‘nup, you can do better than this’. And I hated him for it. But then I started a series of drawings, I looked at patterns in anatomy and patterns in botany and found congruence in these images. So the way that a root system mirrors a nervous system in the body, or the way the petals of a flower can be folds of skin. I thought it was interesting because we see ourselves as something completely separate from nature, but when you bring it down to this very intricate and scientific level, you can feel that connection.

Do you ever find in your drawings repeated characters, storylines or themes that you try to capture?I find the idea of splicing really interesting. I was going through medical journals, looking at really old drawings to find a point of similarity in all these different patterns. I took one, finite image, and I’d splice it in surprising ways that weren’t naturally logical. Another thing I’ve always loved is drawing movement. For a while, a lot of the things I was drawing were based on a book called Aldrovandi’s Monsters. I’ve always been obsessed with tentacles, tendrils, veins, roots; these things I can draw that move across the page but that actually carry your eye line in a direction, rather than an image being a stagnant, singular character. I guess that’s what my point of interest was from then on, this strange intersection between the scientific and the imaginative.

Tell us about your creative process. Where do you start?I start with splicing. I’ll be inspired by one image and then work towards morphing it into something I can call my own. My latest body of work has actually been inspired by a lemon. When I was in California, I came across what’s called a Buddha’s Palm lemon. It’s this really bizarre fruit that’s just rind without any of the insides, but the lemon skin is almost like a tentacle squid. I did thousands of drawings of this lemon and worked that image into different concepts. It looks so animal-like, I turned it into a squid using the same detailed texture. I toy with these ideas about line drawings that seem innocent but have a different message when the work all comes together. In early scientific drawings, there’s an imperfection that reflects playfulness. I think any kind of illustration art that’s imperfect is more individual and more unique.

The way you talk about imperfection makes me think of something like the Courtney Barnett album artwork.Yeah, and what’s interesting about that album work is that it’s imperfect. And that reflects her music; her voice is a little bit imperfect, her style is a little bit casual. Maybe that’s what I’m attracted to with art as well. My work is all hand done. I feel in a way that it’s a bi-product of the way I live – slightly chaotic, where I just have enough time to just get everything done, just. It’s become part of my style.

The Lemon Squid

Which artists inspire you?There’s an artist named Katie Scott who really inspires me. I found her a couple of years after I started doing this style of work. She does all the album artwork for Bombay Bicycle Club. It was one of those moments where you’re sort of on track with a particular concept and then you find an artist who’s captured an idea or a style that you’re moving towards without even realising it. She combines anatomy and intricacy and imaginative detail in a really interesting way.

Your art is guided by your imagination, how do you get into that head space?I look at lot of images and I read a lot of books. I’m usually inspired by one image that sticks in my head, and then it might take a week of background noise for it to formulate. I always work on the floor. I’ll clear everything, move all the furniture aside, I can’t have anyone in the house, and I’ll put on super spacey music, like Beach House or something, and I’ll set myself up with a bunch of art books.

Have you ever surprised yourself with what you’ve been able to do?Yes, the mural [on Bondi Pavilion] was the first large piece I’d ever done. It was daunting for me to translate what was an A4 drawing into this huge, 8x4m piece, and trust that I could have the same control over the lines. But I saw that control of shape and lines and flow coming to life in front of me, although there were points where I wasn’t really sure it was going to translate. You sort of just go with it and hope that it comes together. Maybe out of practice it does, but maybe that’s what creativity is.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?It was from my brother, and this isn’t Hallmark card material. I was 20, and I was at a cross-roads, at the brink of making a bunch of decisions about where to live, what to study, what job to have. I was being held back by what I felt I should do and what I genuinely wanted to do. Art’s involved in this too, because art for me is always about doing it for the love, not doing it for the money or to prove something. I was worrying away about all these decisions I had to make, and he just said ‘do what you want. Do exactly what you want’. It doesn’t sound that inspiring but I think it’s exactly what I needed to hear. And now I feel like, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Right now, I’m doing exactly what I want to.

To find out more about Lily Keenan, visit her website at lilykeenan.com.